Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom

AbrAhAm GAllowAy & the SlAveS’ Civil wAr

D A v i D S. C e C e l S k iAuthor of The Waterman’s Song

T H E F I R E O F F R E E D O M

AbrAhAm h. GAllowAy (1837–70)

was a fiery young slave rebel, radical

abolitionist, and Union spy who rose out

of bondage to become one of the most

significant and stirring black leaders in

the South during the Civil War. Through-

out his brief, mercurial life, Galloway

fought against slavery and injustice.

He risked his life behind enemy lines,

recruited black soldiers for the North,

and fought racism in the Union army’s

ranks. He also stood at the forefront of

an African American political movement

that flourished in the Union-occupied

parts of North Carolina, even leading

a historic delegation of black southern-

ers to the White House to meet with

President Lincoln and to demand the

full rights of citizenship. He later became

one of the first black men elected to the

North Carolina legislature.

Long hidden from history, Galloway’s

story reveals a war unfamiliar to most

of us. As David Cecelski writes, “Gallo-

way’s Civil War was a slave insurgency,

a war of liberation that was the culmina-

tion of generations of perseverance and

faith.” This riveting portrait illuminates

Galloway’s life and deepens our insight

into the Civil War and Reconstruction as

experienced by African Americans in the

South.

“A vividly written and well researched

narrative of the life of a largely over-

looked but major black leader in the

Civil War and Reconstruction. It is true

that slaves earned their freedom by

fighting in the Union forces, sometimes

under horrendously discriminatory cir-

cumstances. Cecelski provides additional

force to the view that slaves militantly

exercised agency in defense of their

rights as the price of their participation.

Galloway was an important voice for

their insistence on a war for their lib-

eration and not just to save the Union.”

— mAry FrAnCeS berry, Geraldine R.

Segal Professor of History, University of

Pennsylvania, and past chair of the United

States Commission on Civil Rights

the UniverSity oF north CArolinA PreSSChapel Hill

the UniverSity oF north CArolinA PreSSwww.uncpress.unc.edu

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Historian David S. Cecelski is the author, most recently, of The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina.

Cover illUStrAtionS: “Colored Troops, under General

Wild, Liberating Slaves in North Carolina,” from Harper’s

Weekly, 23 Jan. 1864, courtesy, North Carolina Collection,

University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill; por-

trait of Abraham Galloway from William Still, The Under

ground Railroad (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872) Printed in U.S.A.


T H E

F I R E O F

F R E E-DOM

CeCelSki

“An excellent work of scholar-

ship by a topflight historian.

I am deeply impressed by the

detective work that went into

discovering Galloway’s story.”

— eDwArD e. bAPtiSt,

Cornell University


The Fire of Freedom

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

DAviD S. CeCelSki

The Secret Feelings of Their Hearts • 5

2The Secret Feelings of Their Hearts

in eArly 1857, younG AbrAhAm GAllowAy voweD to DepArt the world of his childhood. At twenty years old, he had lived by the banks of the Cape Fear River all his life and had never traveled more than a day’s journey from his friends and family in Smithville and Wilmington. But that spring he and a friend grew determined, they later explained, “that liberty was worth dying for, and that it was their duty to strike for freedom even if it should cost them their lives.”1 His friend was a slave named Rich-ard Eden, a barber by trade and a couple years older than Galloway. While they resided in Wilmington, the two young men grew close enough that they eventually dared “to communicate the secret feelings of their hearts.”2 A yearning for freedom was not the only reason behind their decision to risk their lives and attempt to escape from Wilmington. Galloway had also been having difficulty earning the wages that Milton Hankins expected of him. A large influx of Irish and German immigrants into the city had tightened the local labor market, increased the competition for building jobs, and exerted a downward pressure on wages. Tensions between en-slaved builders and free white tradesmen heightened and occasionally be-came bitter.3 The danger for a slave builder like Galloway was greater than merely low wages, however. Galloway’s value in dollars represented a sig-nificant part of Hankins’s total worth, and the young male slave was ulti-mately his most important asset. If Galloway did not bring enough money into the household, Hankins may have felt compelled to put him up for sale at the local slave market. A strong young man with a skilled trade was worth a great deal, probably in the neighborhood of $1,000 or $1,200, at a time when Hankins’s house and lot on Fourth Street had a tax value of less than $100. Under those circumstances, Galloway had good cause to fear his sale to parts unknown.

The fear of sale spurred many slaves to flight. Few would have resented the prospect of being sold more than Galloway, though. He was a pride-ful, thin- skinned youth, proud of his abilities and prickly about the slight-est affront to his dignity. He was also all too familiar with the slave pens downtown, where auctioneers and buyers treated blacks no different from livestock.4 Like all local slaves, Galloway had seen the caravans of chained black men, women, and children trudging through town along the Post Road.5 No slave could reliably protect himself or herself from such a fate, but Galloway would have taken great risks to avoid being herded into those slave pens, put on public display on that auction block, or confined in those shackles. His co- conspirator, Richard Eden, had other considerations in mind when he joined Galloway’s bid to gain his freedom. Prior to 1857, Eden had managed to fashion a measure of independence for himself within the sea-port. He recalled his owner, a woman named Mary Ormes or Mary Lorens, as “tender hearted,” and another contemporary remembered her as “very indulgent with her slaves for the times.” With her support, Eden served as the barber at the Carolina Hotel and shared his profits with her. He always “had some spending money by him,” a contemporary recalled.6 Eden had also learned to read and write by trading little pies and banjo songs for les-sons with a group of schoolchildren who were devoted to him. They called themselves the “Pie Society.”7 The relative equanimity of Eden’s life changed in 1857. Sometime early that year, Wilmington authorities discovered that he had clandestinely married a free mixed- race woman. Their nuptials broke a state law pro-hibiting slaves and free citizens, of any color, from marrying.8 Eden faced a penalty of thirty- nine lashes on his bare back under the terms of the law. Dreading the whip’s lash and fearing that he might be torn from his wife’s side forever in retribution for his crime, the star- crossed Eden decided that he had little left to lose and grew determined to escape from the seaport. National political affairs may also have influenced the timing of the young men’s decision to flee Wilmington. That spring the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that blacks could never be full citizens of the United States. Widely considered today one of the most extreme misreadings of the Con-stitution in U.S. history, Dred Scott v. Sandford was one of a number of incidents in the late 1850s that smothered African American hopes that the nation would ever rise to its democratic ideals. Scott, a slave, had sued for his freedom and the freedom of his wife and two daughters because they had been held in northern states and territories where slavery was illegal at

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Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom